November 14 - Happy Birthday, Claude Monet

Posted on November 14, 2021

This is an update of my post published on November 14, 2010:

The French impressionist painter Claude Monet was born on this day in1840.

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that features small, visible brush strokes, open composition, ordinary subject matter, and an emphasis on the portrayal of light in all its varieties.

Monet made two paintings of the Rouen Cathedral,
one in full sun and the other in morning light.

Haystacks (Midday), by Claude Monet

Monet was one of the founders of the Impressionist movement, and he and a small group of painters working in Paris, France, broke the standards then upheld for art:

Old standard: Paint realistically.

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of Horatil

Impressionists painted their own personal emotional impressions of people or scenes.

Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden at Argenteuil, by Claude Monet

Old standard: Don’t let the brush strokes show! It will look like a painting, not reality!

Detail from Titian painting

Impressionists reveled in the brush strokes! A painting can look quite different close up from afar.

Visible brushstrokes from Vincent van Gogh, above, and Claude Monet, below

Old standard: Use somber, realistic colors.

The Mill, by Rembrandt van Rijn

Impressionists played with colors. They dabbed different colors next to each other, at times—letting them mix together in the viewers’ eyes.

Old standard: Paint historical themes, religious themes, and portraits.

Battle of La Hogue, by Benjamin West

Impressionists painted anything and everything, particularly nature (that is, landscapes).

Landscape in Giverny, by Claude Monet

Old standard: Paint grand people in formal poses – and grand events.

Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield, by Thomas Gainsborough

Impressionists painted ordinary people in casual poses and everyday life and events.

Oarsmen at Chatou, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The name for the movement came from one of Monet’s paintings, Impression, Sunrise (pictured below).

Monet became known for his paintings of haystacks, gardens, and water lilies, but he painted a wide range of landscapes and seascapes.

Celebrate Monet!

Read the book Linnea in Monet’s Garden, by Christina Bjork and Lena Anderson. (There is a video as well.)

Enjoy a slide show of Monet’s work.

Monet made a series of paintings of water lilies. Check out the colors he used and the lighting and seasonal variations he captured here.

Watch a modern painter creating a water lily painting here, for even more inspiration.

Then try your own hand at painting water lilies.

You may want to try chalk or pastel on wet tempera paint on oatmeal paper (or construction paper). After drawing a simple rough draft on the paper, paint a small area, no larger than your fist, with white tempera paint. Next, moisten the chalk and quickly draw on the still-wet paint. You can blend several colors of chalk, and of course the chalk will blend with the paint as well.

At the Garden of Praise website, there are paintings, a simple biography, a jigsaw puzzle, and other puzzles and games.

Also on this date: